Politics

On 21 September 2004, H.E. Mr. Luis Inacio Lura da Silva, President of Brazil, H.E. Mr. Joschka Fisber, Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany, H.E. Dr. Manmoban Singh, Prime Minister of India, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan met in New York to discuss the reform of the United Nations. Following is the Joint Press Statement of the Meeting:

1. In order for the international community to effectively address the various threats and challenges that it presently faces, it is important to reform the United Nations as a whole.

2. The General Assembly must be revitalized, as it represents the general will of all Member States. We must also enhance the efficiency of the UN agencies and organs in the social and economic fields in order to effectively address urgent challenges.

3. The Security Council must reflect the realities of the international community in the 21st century. It must be representative, legitimate and effective. It is essential that the Security Council include, on permanent basis, countries that have the will and the capacity to take on major responsibilities with regard to the maintenance of international peace and security. There also has been a nearly four-fold increase in the membership of the United Nations since its inception in 1945, including a sharp increase in the number of developing countries. The Security Council, therefore, must be expanded in both the permanent and non-permanent categories, including developing and developed countries as new permanent members.

4. Brazil, Germany, India and Japan, based on the firmly shared recognition that they are legitimate candidates for permanent membership in an expanded Security Council, support each other’s candidature. Africa must be represented in the permanent membership in the Security Council. We will work together with other like-minded Member States towards realizing a meaningful reform of the United Nations, including that of the Security Council.

Let’s look at this statement in detail and see if we can determine its meaning. We’ll take them in order.

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Jeez, what an idiot. Her tone is hysterical, her assertions are wrong and her premise (the press is intimidated but she isn’t?) is ridiculous. I can’t explain her apparent belief that she will succeed in SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER where lesser mortals fail. Maybe where she lives they don’t have Google and people still get their news from the afternoon paper. Whatever. Call me reckless but I don’t think she’s going to change many voters’ minds. I can’t imagine how Dick Gephardt was able to put up with this kind of nonsense when he was fundraising in Hollywood.

I gotta knock it off with the posts bashing lefty fools. It’s just too easy. I would say that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but it’s really more like fishing in a barrel with dynamite and the fish are already dead.

My response to commenter Herb Richter on this thread became so long that I decided to make it into a new post.

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Herb wrote:

Do you seriously believe that the terrorists would abandon months and months of planning because of a few statements by John Kerry saying that he would go after them as well?

I can’t prove that the terrorists would be deterred. However, I’d rather we didn’t run that risk, and it wouldn’t cost Kerry much to make such a statement. We are dealing with marginal effects here, not all-or-none. I think terrorists, on the margin, will be less likely to attack if we reduce the prospective payoff for an attack. One way to reduce that payoff is to eliminate any uncertainty about the harshness of our response.

As for your second point, I think it’s clear that the terrorists understand us in some respects but not others. They were, as you correctly point out, smart enough to plan and implement a large and tactically innovative attack on 9/11, yet they completely misjudged our response. I do not believe that we can predict reliably that they won’t attempt a Madrid-type attack on us. Indeed I am not certain that such an attack on us before the elections wouldn’t be effective in shifting votes away from Bush. I hope that it wouldn’t be but who knows. Given that Kerry is the only person who could state with authority what a Kerry administration would do, I think it would be prudent for him to make clear that a Madrid-type attack would not be effective. Subtlety and ambiguity on our part are not helpful in deterring an enemy who understands only explicit statements and forceful actions.

With respect to your third point:

While Al Qaeda may indeed perceive the Spanish election results as vindication for their tactics, should a democracy really let the fear of future terrorist attacks in other countries keep its citizens from ousting a government that it no longer trusts? If we no longer vote our conscience in an election because of how we think terrorists might perceive the outcome, democracy becomes a futile exercise.

The problem is that the terrorists are involved whether we want them to be or not. We no more have the option of ignoring how our domestic politics plays abroad than did Britons in 1940. Politics, as the famous aphorism puts it, is about the possible. Sometimes that means choosing the lesser evil. I don’t see why reelecting a flawed government that has a decent track record at waging war, as opposed to untested challengers whose alternative vision is, at best, indistinct, isn’t wise behavior for voters in a democracy.

Democratic politics means lots of people have a say in major decisions. Often the choices that voters get are between bad and worse, but the fact that the options aren’t as good as some theoretical alternative doesn’t make democracy a “futile exercise.” Nowadays the enemy gets a vote, too. Ignoring that fact won’t make it go away.

Whatever the precise odds that the U.S. will be hit by a Madrid-style terror attack before the November elections, the possibility of such an attack hangs over our public life like a cloud. Our leaders tiptoe around the specifics of the issue. Indeed there probably isn’t much that the Administration can do, beyond what it is already doing, at least in its foreign policy.

But John Kerry can help to deter such an attack. A pre-election terror wave would likely be intended to get Kerry elected and therefore to shift U.S. policy toward accommodationism. That might not be what would actually happen after an attack, but it’s probably what the terrorists expect.

Kerry could lessen the odds of an attack by reducing its expected payoff. He could do this by stating, unambiguously and repeatedly, that he rejects appeasement and that, if he is elected, he will redouble President Bush’s efforts to eradicate Islamist terrorists and the regimes that support them. Of course, to state the issue in this way is to make clear that Kerry is unlikely to follow through. (See Dick Morris’s analysis of Kerry’s political dilemma.)

In this regard, the fact that Kerry has had his running mate state publicly that some of America’s more flaccid allies prefer Kerry to Bush is reckless. It encourages the terrorists to see a big payoff if, as they see it, they hit us hard enough to get Bush defeated. NATO is weak, Chirac is weak — our enemies see this even if some of us do not, and will correctly conclude that a country that chooses weak allies is itself weak. The kind of political posturing that Kerry and Edwards are doing is dangerous, and for this reason alone they are not qualified to be elected.